Customisation
PHPBB has got to have just about the worst goddam custom style template system ever. That’s the problem with freeware systems like this (and PHPNuke CMS which I evaluated recently), they’re just so, I don’t know, leaden. So fucking counter intuitive.
One of the joys of Wordpress is that it’s very easy to set up a new theme for your blog and roll it out. I’ve recently been messing with Subdreamer and, quite frankly, customising that makes Wordpress looks like it needs a phD in CSS engineering. PHPBB, on the other hand, does require several rocket scientists, a couple of brain surgeons and a 4 year old video timer reprogrammer to understand what the hell is going on.
The article in the knowledge base that tells you how to start making your own style begins something like this.
Copy the existing default style and change the name of the .cfg file, the folder and the contents of the info file.
To my mind, a decent theme system would start with instructions along the lines of
Create a new folder called “MyTheme”. Create a file called “MyTheme.xxx”
In an ideal world, you’d be nearly done by this point apart from adding a few colours, possibly altering the layout slightly and so on. But back to PHPBB - ready to change the colour of the background yet? Woah there, Tex! Hold your horses! Before we can even choose which shade of pastel sepia is ideal for a table border, we have to amend references in 18 (18! 18! Eight-fucking-teen!) template files to make sure that any reference to the default theme we copied.
Why? Because the references to the sodding images and other dependant files are all fucking hardcoded! I mean, what sort of shit is this? Who on earth hard codes stuff that might, you know, perhaps even possibly be changed by someone who wants to rebrand their forum. Maybe even change the layout a little.
Having just spent the last couple of hours trying to even begin to get the forum to recognise my copied and renamed theme folder without any joy whatsoever, you can imagine that I’m a little fricking pissed off with the system at the moment.
phpBB is evil - one of the few worse things I’ve experienced was the phpBB plug-in for Mambo. That one *really* needed shooting.
Did you see, though, that the people behind Wordpress have launched a beta release of bbPress, a forum done in similar style to WP, with lots of cuddly niceness such as you describe…
Comment by Lyle — November 16, 2006 @ 10:08 am
I like to use phpBB, and I like to admin things I like to use: I think I have a fondness for it since it was the first thing of its sort I picked up, before I realised things could be easier. It desperately needs a plugin API though, because making people edit the core for even the simplest of mods is crazy. The actual template engine is quite nice, but the management of styles themselves seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought, with problems like the hardcoding you describe and quirks like inserting CSS from the DB into the head of each page.
“That’s the problem with freeware systems like this…”
That’s not really it though, is it? You like WP and you know how much I rave about Nucleus CMS, and both are GPL, same as phpBB.
They’ve for phpBB 3 in beta, but I’m not hopeful that it will fix these things. I still haven’t found anything decent though: maybe bbPress will be the answer.
Incidentally, what did you make of PHPNuke? I realise it probably sucks, but I doubt it sucks much more than Drupal, which is what I currently use.
Comment by QE — November 16, 2006 @ 12:33 pm
PhpBB has it’s appeal in that of all the forums I’ve used, it’s quite easy and generally does what you need it to do. This is the first time I’ve tried customising it and doing any administration.
PHPNuke was, as far as I was concerned, a mess. I don’t mean to slander freeware as such - Wordpress is a joy to use and customise although I’m yet to attempt any plugins for it so I can’t comment on the API. But PHPNuke and PHPBB are the type of thing that I mean: good ideas that have spiralled out of control. The fact that PHPNuke needs a load of security patching before you can feasibly deploy it is ridiculous. The admin screen annoyed me too.
I’ll perservere with PHPBB for now but will keep an eye on BBpress because it’s likely to be great - if it’s anything like WP that is.
Comment by Dragon — November 16, 2006 @ 6:32 pm
I got around to having a look at bbPress, and I didn’t realise quite how immature it was. It’ll be brilliant in a couple of years, but as a person who doesn’t really have the time or the skill to be a serious contributor it may be too much work for me now.
Although it’s a huge hassle to maintain and modify, phpBB does what I need it to, and is the only such thing I’ve found so far.
Comment by QE — November 16, 2006 @ 9:20 pm